Cellar Door

I demand to know the answer again, but Luke doesn’t respond. Instead, he opens the cellar door. Silent for too long as my nerves collide. Then: “I’ve killed eleven devils.”

I swallow hard, unable to blink, scared any movement will shift the still air too much and he’ll flee. Eleven devils. He saw Hudson as something evil.

There are other victims.

“The bodies aren’t inside my artwork,” he says. “That’d be an insult to what I do. Keep digging for your answers, Mak. I promise, you’ll find him.” He steps through the door. “And put some clothes on.”

The door closes, sucking all the air from the room. I struggle to breathe as I press a hand to my throat. My blood pulses, every bang matching the storm rioting inside me.

12

Voices

Luke

Everyone hears voices.

We have a constant, internal monologue running in the background of our thoughts. Just like the heart, the brain never stops. The heart keeps beating while we sleep, a muscle that never gets a break, pumping blood to our cerebral cortex, supplying the brain with literal food for thought to keep that monologue going.

Some voices are louder than others.

Some voices are in such direct contrast to our subconscious, it’s as if they’re screaming inside our skull.

If you force yourself to listen, if you try to silence everything else, you can hear a muffled form of your own voice whispering inside your head. That’s the conscience. Guiding us to make choices. We hear this voice so often we no longer notice it, the voice so internalized it’s become a comfort.

I don’t fear the voices. They’re supposed to be there.

I fear when they stop.

There is nothing I dread more than absolute silence. It’s a terrifying thought that washes me in a blanket of cold sweat. The day the voices stop…I’ll have no guidance, no conscience.

You become a monster when you start removing pieces, carving out your humanity. No conscience, no empathy—just the void—is the perfect breeding ground for devils.

Monsters are made by what we allow to be stolen.

As I sit parked across the street from the morgue, I have two voices battling for dominance. One whispers so quietly I have to strain to hear. The other roars and thrashes.

This voice has been winning out more and more.

I’ve let this go on long enough. Makenna can’t untangle the web. She’s buried herself too far down in denial. Hell, she might even deserve her revenge. Who am I to decide if it’s directed in the wrong place? Faced with the terrifying truth, she might come completely undone. She’s already broken. Whatever I’ve done to her, Royce Hudson broke her long before I got to her.

But the other voice dominates that notion, beating it down.

She’s a part of this.

I saw it in her eyes tonight, that utter look of lost. But she’s not an innocent victim, or a damsel. She’s a hack ex-detective who had a crooked, sadistic cop for a partner, and she will never accept that fact.

Guilt by ignorance is still guilt.

Truth hurts. But I fucking guarantee the girls who have been abused by those fiends were hurt worse than Makenna can ever imagine.

She locked herself in that cellar. I might hold the key, but she holds the way out.

I pull my hood over my head and slip on leather gloves. Then I get out of the damn car. I break into the morgue fencing, my conscience just a gnat easily swatted away.

As I’m disarming the alarm, I hear footsteps. I was hoping tonight would be easy, but there hasn’t been anything easy since Makenna crashed the party.

> Back flattened to the side of the building, I unsheathe the knife from my leg strap, and wait for the security cop to come around the corner. This time, I made sure to cover my face with a handkerchief. The cellar is getting crowded.